Roger Owen - A Remembrance of a Life Well Lived

This afternoon I attended a memorial ceremony for Roger Owen, the A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle Eastern History emeritus at Harvard University, who passed away on December 22, 2018.  As many know, Roger made considerable contributions to the field of Middle Eastern and post-colonial studies.  His books on the economic history of the MENA region, and the origins and functioning of the authoritarian state, which he framed using a political economy approach, not only challenged many Orientalist tenets, but led many young scholars to develop new conceptual frameworks for studying the region. 

Both at the ceremony and reception which followed at the  Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies which he directed for many years, many colleagues, former students and family members spoke eloquently about Roger’s legacy.  It was clear from the numerous accolades that Roger touched the many lives in his 83 years.

As for myself, I was fortunate to receive funding for doctoral dissertation research many years ago from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, where Roger directed the Middle East Centre, before joining Harvard in 1993.  Coming to Oxford from Egypt, where I had been studying Egyptian efforts through the Bank Misr and the Misr Group of companies, in the 1920s and 1930s, to challenge British domination of the economy, turned out to be much more than an opportunity to study sources relevant to my research at the Public Records Office (the National Archives) in London.

Once at St. Antony’s, I soon learned that Roger was the main force behind the establishment of a study group on the Middle East which included many eminent scholars of the region. The study group was not designed to gather more “facts” but rather to restructure the manner in which the Middle East was viewed in academic circles and the normative dimensions of choosing one conceptual approach over another.

In addition to Roger, at Oxford I had the chance to meet Aziz Azmah, Michael Gilsenan, Caglar Kaydar, Philip Khoury, Samir Radwan, Barbara Smith and many other theorists whose work would profoundly affect my own. Having been exposed to the modernization theory of the 1960s and 1970s, I now found that my sessions with my Oxford colleagues allowed me to develop a new approach and situate my research in a political economy perspective.

This new perspective, facilitated by Roger’s efforts to develop a progressive intellectual community at Oxford, revolutionized my thinking. Despite being characterized as “Marxist” by the late Charles Issawi, who served as a reader of my manuscript, my dissertation was subsequently published by Princeton University Press.

The Oxford study group was, in turn, linked to a larger group which Talal Asad, then at Hull University, and Roger established.  This larger group, which came to be known as the Hull Middle East Studies Seminar, organized a number of conferences at Hull University during the late 1970 and 1980s, which attracted scholars not only from the UK but from continental Europe and the US as well.  The result of these conferences was the well-known Review of Middle East Studies series.

The activities of the Hull Middle East Studies Seminar, a group which attacked Orientalism before Edward Said’s famous book of the same title made the term famous, inspired young academics in the US to establish the Alternative Middle East Studies Seminar (with the awkward acronym AMESS) in the mid and late 1970s which founded chapters on ten major campuses with Middle East studies programs throughout the US. 

Despite dissolving during the 1980s, these US study groups, modeled on what Talal Asad and Roger had created in the UK have had a lasting impact in breaking from the traditional area studies and ideational model which had heretofore dominated studies of the region.

More recently, Roger, and  his close friend and colleague, Muhamed Almaliky of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, organized two excellent symposia on Iraq in March 2017 and March 2018.  These symposia brought together older and younger researchers, producing a rich intellectual synthesis between more established approaches to the study of Iraq with innovative concepts and methodologies of a new generation of analysts.  At the evening dinner last March, which capped such an inspirational day, Roger regaled us all with a lovely, gentle French song before we departed.

Roger never took himself too seriously.  He treated everyone he met with dignity and respect which were duly returned.  He loved sports and was an accomplished Rugby player at Oxford with a large photograph of his team affixed to a wall in his house.  At first glance, Roger could  come across as serious.  But it was never long before a joke and an impish smile, which all his friends knew so well, came across his face.    

Roger was a man of the left but he never let a rigid ideology distort his scholarship. Given his personal values and demeanor, and his scholarship, h leaves a model to be emulated by us all.